Play therapy and counselling on Pender Island
For kids and teens carrying big feelings — and adults finding their way through grief, change, trauma, or a newly understood neurodivergent life.
In-person counselling on Pender Island, with online counselling available throughout British Columbia.
Sometimes life changes the story you thought you were living.
Your child may suddenly be anxious, explosive, clingy, withdrawn, not sleeping, refusing things they used to manage, or just not quite themselves.
Maybe there has been a death. A separation. A move. A frightening experience. A new school. A family change.
Or maybe there hasn’t been one clear event at all.
Some kids experience the world intensely. They notice everything. Feel everything. Hold it together until they can’t. And sometimes what adults see as behaviour is really a nervous system doing the best it can with something that feels too big.
Children don’t always have the words to tell us what is happening.
That’s where play comes in.
Kids don’ t have to talk like adults to do meaningful therapy.
Play is one of the primary ways children make sense of themselves, their relationships, and what has happened around them.
In play therapy, a child might build, draw, move, hide, make up elaborate worlds, repeat the same story twelve different ways, make absolutely nothing that appears remotely therapeutic happen for twenty minutes — and still be doing important work.
I pay attention to what is happening underneath.
Not simply, “How do we stop this behaviour?”
But:
What is this child trying to communicate?
What has become too much?
What helps their nervous system find its way back to safety, connection, and choice?
My work with children and teens is relational, attachment-focused, neurodivergent-affirming, trauma-informed, and grounded in Synergetic Play Therapy.
Not only for kids…
Sometimes adults arrive in therapy because life has broken open in some way.
Someone died.
A relationship ended.
Your health, family, work, identity, or future changed.
Or you learned at 38 or 52 or 67 that you are autistic or have ADHD, and suddenly your history looks different from this new vantage point.
You may not be looking for someone to teach you a coping skill or help you “get back to normal.”
You may need somewhere to make sense of what happened.
To grieve.
To untangle.
To notice what your body has been carrying.
To question old stories about who you were supposed to be.
And eventually, perhaps, to find out what comes next.
There is room for that here too.
You don’t have to perform okay here.
A lot of therapy is organized around getting somewhere.
Reduce the symptoms.
Fix the behaviour.
Learn the skill.
Move forward.
Sometimes that’s useful.
But grief does not need to be tidied up.
A neurodivergent person does not need to become better at looking neurotypical.
And a child having a hard time does not need to become more convenient for the adults around them.
I’m more interested in understanding what is happening underneath — and helping create enough safety, connection, awareness, and choice that something new becomes possible.
The work may involve conversation, play, art, movement, metaphor, humour, silence, body awareness, or sitting with something you have spent a very long time trying not to feel.
There is room here to be complicated.
Hi, I’m Dylan,
I’m a play therapist and counsellor.
I’m a play therapist and counsellor who works in a depth-oriented, relational way with children, teens, and adults.
I’ve spent most of my career with people whose inner lives don’t fit very neatly into a checklist.
Kids with enormous feelings.
Teens who have very little interest in sitting across from an adult and politely explaining themselves.
Adults grieving people, relationships, futures, identities, or versions of their lives they thought they were going to have.
Neurodivergent people who have spent years wondering why ordinary life seemed to require so much extraordinary effort.
My work draws from Synergetic Play Therapy, NARM, relational neuroscience, attachment, trauma work, grief counselling, mindfulness, and nervous-system regulation.
But therapy with me is also very human.
We might talk deeply. We might laugh. You might swear. Your kid might spend half the session building something and say three words.
I don’t expect you — or your child — to arrive knowing exactly what you need.
We can begin with what is happening now.
Ways To Work With Me
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Kids & Teens
For children and teens navigating anxiety, grief, trauma, neurodivergence, family change, major transitions, or feelings that keep coming out sideways.
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Adult Counseling
Depth and connection therapy for grief, loss, life transitions, trauma, and the often-complicated experience of recognizing ADHD or autism later in life.
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Personal Therapy Retreats
Longer, spacious sessions for people who want time to go deeper than a weekly therapy hour allows. In person and online.
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How Therapy Works Here
Therapy at Elowen is relational, neurodivergent-affirming, and nervous-system-informed.
I draw from Synergetic Play Therapy, NARM, attachment, relational neuroscience, grief work, and decades of experience working with people in the middle of difficult things.
We slow down enough to understand what is actually happening underneath.
From there, the work is less about becoming someone different and more about developing greater safety, connection, understanding, and choice.
Wondering if this might be a fit?
You don’t need to know exactly what kind of therapy you need before you contact me.
Tell me a little about what is happening — for you or for your child — and we can talk about whether working together makes sense.
In-person counselling on Pender Island.
Online counselling throughout British Columbia.
